FME Blog

Pair Snowflake & FME for Accessible Geospatial Data

Stephanie Warner

June 14, 2022•5 min

By pairing FME with Snowflake, you can build better IT processes and the foundation for location intelligence.

What is the importance of accessible geospatial data?

In a rapidly changing world, geospatial data has become a critical business asset for various industries, including retail, health, government, and utilities but how accessible is the data? The return of investment (ROI) that location data provides is evident by the market growth – by 2027, the location intelligence market is projected to reach $32.58 billion USD, that’s up 176% from 2020!

However, many companies are not embracing this booming market because they don’t know how to integrate location data into their business processes.

Providing Accessible Geospatial Data is a Challenge

As experts in spatial data integration for nearly 30 years, can we just say – we get it. Geospatial data can be complex. Accessible geospatial data? Maybe even more so. For one thing, the earth is massive, so spatial datasets are usually massive too – not something that can simply be shared in an email.

Even when you can share the files, your end-user often can’t even open it because spatial data is typically made up of rasters, vectors, attributes, and many other detailed properties that make computer fans rev like a Boeing 737.

The result? Spatial data is left siloed in technical departments that cannot be accessed easily, and opportunities for location intelligence are lost. This is a huge blow because location data is some of the most unique and valuable data companies can leverage. It can be the difference between a retail shop that thrives and fails. It can be the difference in predicting the effects of global health pandemics such as Covid-19, before it even happens.

We’ve worked with over 10,000 customers to help them integrate spatial data and firmly believe that geospatial data is for everyone. Geospatial data should be accessible.

With the right tools, creating simple IT processes that make accessible geospatial data available for all departments is not as complicated as expected. Not only will your business benefit from location intelligence, but the process will also create an agile and integrated enterprise.

FME & Snowflake

Together, Snowflake and FME offer a no-code solution for transforming, storing and utilizing geospatial data in the cloud.

Geospatial data in the cloud means that the right people have access to all the data they need to make informed business decisions. Snowflake’s Data Cloud offers numerous benefits including:

Optimizing costs and scaling: costs associated with infrastructure are removed, and as workloads increase, you don’t have to purchase new hardware.
Enhanced security and sharing: Snowflake’s built-in security allows you to confidently store and share your data.
Backup and failure recovery are available at no additional cost.
One unified management console offers a single source of truth for data.

FME is the data integration platform with the best support for spatial data worldwide – and it’s exactly what you need to extract, transform, and load data into Snowflake.

With hundreds of readers and writers included in FME, users can directly load virtually any type of data, including business, geospatial, structured, semi, and unstructured, into Snowflake. These readers and writers have coding built-in, so your team will never have to write a line of code to access data. We promise your sales and marketing departments will thank you!

Safe Software, the makers of FME, are technology partners of Snowflake, and FME is Snowflake Ready. FME allows you to:

Extract and load data into Snowflake using FME’s Snowflake Spatial Reader/Writer.
Scale on the fly. Modeled after Snowflake, you can only pay for what you use by pairing dynamic engines in FME with Snowflake.
Deploy anywhere. Like Snowflake, FME is cloud-agnostic so that you can store data and workflows across multiple regions and providers.

FME and Snowflake are your solution to accessible geospatial data and an integrated enterprise. By combining FME and Snowflake, you can bridge the gap between applications, teams, and stakeholders. In addition to data sharing and storing, you can:

Automate workflows that load and extract data on a schedule or in response to a trigger.
Easily integrate your Snowflake Cloud Data Platform with any application or web service containing a REST or SOAP API.
Design application integration workflows that automatically update the data store as soon as a single data entry is changed.

With your data in Snowflake, it’s easy to push the data to business intelligence platforms to gain location intelligence insights and initiate machine learning, as IMGS did here.

If you want to get started moving your spatial data to Snowflake, download a free trial of FME and get step-by-step instructions from our FME & Snowflake training course. You can also get inspired by one of our joint customers, IHS Markit, who migrated terabytes of data into Snowflake using FME in just 5 hours.

Don’t miss out on leveraging location intelligence because you don’t have the right systems in place. By moving your data to Snowflake with FME, your organization can benefit from spatial data and beyond!

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